"I regret having made such remarks," Bishop Richard Williamson said in a statement on a Catholic Web site where he has posted in the past. "If I had known beforehand the full harm and hurt to which they would give rise, especially to the Church, but also to survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich, I would not have made them."

He did not retract the comments or say he had changed his mind about the Holocaust.

Williamson made headlines partly because Pope Benedict XVI lifted his longstanding excommunication, along with that of three other members of the ultra-conservative Society of St. Pius X, shortly after the interview was broadcast. The excommunication and its reversal were not related to Williamson's Holocaust denial.